Beacon of Creation

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

-Top-down challenge: Design a card that evokes the sensation of being “indoors”.
-Bottom-up challenge: Design a red common that dabbles in undermined design space for red.
-Bonus challenge: Design some common trespass cards.

I added the new design skeleton and the first version of all the commons to the sidebar ->

Feel free to print out the commons and playtest them. Any feedback on how they play would be very helpful. Send feedback on playtests to playtest@beaconofcreation.com.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Worldbuilding Challenge:
Rare mystery card that use clues. Make sure it's a cool story moment, as this will be canon in Castmire's story.

Castmire Design Challenge:
A common Haunt creature. (current colors for Haunt are Green, Black, and White)

Current reminder text for Trespass:
(As this spell resolves, exile it haunting target land. When that land's controller is dealt combat damage, you may cast this spell without paying its mana cost. Then put it into its owner's graveyard.)

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Black uncommon that returns a creature from the graveyard to the battlefield.

Just a heads up, I added the Design skeleton to the sidebar as well as all the Castmire worldbuilding challenges as an MSE file to download. The Version # on the Castmire file always updated with the episode number that it's been updated with.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

French vanilla creature with a combination of two evergreen/deciduous keywords we haven’t seen before in Magic, and they must NOTE be a non-bo, like:

Flying, reach ← no

First strike, double strike ← no

Castmire Worldbuilding Challenge:

Black uncommon or uncommons that do one or more of several different effects, which are listed on the blog - they include things like creature sacrifice, returning creatures from the graveyard, discard, etc.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Host/Augment: A black draw spell that doesn't make you sacrifice a permanent or lose life.

Castmire Worldbuilding challenge: Design a card named Red Herring

Challenges due August 6

Host/Augment: Design a card that mentions the term "commander"/must be colorless.

Castmire Worldbuilding challenge: Design any number of cards that are named for spooky mansion/ noir tropes. (eg: Bump in the Night, etc.)

Here are all the clues I promised:

From James Gover (bobbbyyy):

Not all the portals are closed….

There is one at the corner of a busy courtyard.

It is disguised as a thick door padlocked by Barstoe, who believes only he has a key and hence access.

The reality is otherwise. Other agents know of the portal and have other uses. Dark lurk-ers of the mansion pick the lock and use the portal for disposing if evidence, waste and occasionally bodies.

Dack has found the portal from the other side touching an artifact that come from Castmire which revealed the nature of the planar portal and the small mansion plane. Dack then followed the signature of the portal to Castmire to do Dack stuff.

Barstoe’s use for the portal was to syphon excess energy to provide lighting and heating for the mansion. When Ashiok arrived and started messing with things Barstoe’s portal became neglected and releasing sporadic energy.

This is where Taccatta’s investigation comes into it. And then the three clues.

The door has two pairs of going in and one going out.

The lights keep flickering and losing power.

Barstoe’s office has a bunch of letters on the desk to his pen pal on the other side of the portal. The clue art should feature things to provide small hints like glimpses of words from another plane.

Nich Grayson (@WUBRG):

* There is always a knife missing from the knife block in the
kitchen. No matter how often kitchen staff replaces it, a knife will
disappear.

* Occasionally, there appears a
protoplasmic glowing bloody hand-print in the center of a door leading
into to the old formal dining hall.

* Hidden
beneath the wallpaper of the dining hall is an unfinished spiral-design
of magic symbols carved into the wall. The wall weeps blood through the
wallpaper no matter how often they try to wipe it up or paper over it.
The weeping comes from these carved symbols.

Friday, July 13, 2018

We just bought the domain beaconofcreation.com. (I'm not sure why I linked it, since it just brings you back here.) I just thought it would be easier to get people to look at the blog for the challenges.

Anyway, here are the challenges:

Challenges due Monday July 16:

Host/Augment: Design a creature of a creature type without an ability
that most creatures of that type have. It must be flavored as a
sentient race.

Worldbuilding: Design up to three different cards, each based on a piece
of flavor text that someone else submitted for the previous challenge.

Noted below --

Bradley
"It's either a mirror or a window. Either way, it's bad."

"Finally," Ashiok whispered to themselves.

Not every creak is the floorboards.

Adam
The cellar has been devoid of life of for decades, but that doesn't mean it is uninhabited.

Travelers who wander from the main rooms of Castmire Mansion often find themselves lost for days at a time.

No one ever thinks to leave the property. It never even crosses their minds.

James Gover (bobbbyyy)

“Damn Pixies”

I have a series describing The Courtyard

“In the Courtyard guests have high tea, sandwiches with the crusts off” W

“Gargoyles above the Courtyard watch, stalk, and stare” C

“The Courtyard has four walls, or more accurately, gates” L

“The Courtyard has shadows and the shadows have sinister types and the sinister types have blades and the blades have edges” B

“The gardens of the Courtyard provide a wilds within the walls” G

“Someone had to document The Courtyard” U

“The heat vents in The Courtyard provide warmth for tropical plants but have been known to cook unhappy wildlife” R

Challenges due July 23:

Host/Augment (hole filling edition): Design a green enchantment that is powerful enough to see playin Legacy without breaking standard.

Castmire Worldbuilding Challenge: Tell us one of the mysteries of the Manor, and three clues that help Tacatta or someone else discover it.

Friday, June 15, 2018

When designing creatures in the future, remember to stay within the creature grid as much as possible. They are some exceptions, but moving forward, these are going to be the basic creature types we use a lot of.

I also forgot to post the style guide submissions from last week (sorry!) Check the bottom of last week's post for those links.

Challenges:

Due Monday, July 18 by 7pm Pacific time:

Host + Augment Challenge

Multicolor Dwarf with no power or toughness that cares about precombat and/or postcombat main phases that is from a set that’s a top-down Viking world with black-aligned Gods.
- Can use only a portion of these, but more challenging, the more restrictions you decide to use

Castmire Worldbuilding Challenge:

Design a vanilla creature, a virtual vanilla creature, and French vanilla creature, and a virtual French vanilla creature; all set in the world of Castmire.
- Haunt, investigate, and detain are the keywords we are using

Due Monday, July 25th by 7pm Pacific time:

Host + Augment

Host: Brad’s, using a suggestion from Twitter:
From Trevor Cashmore (@InanimateGames, of Goblin Artisans)
“A common non-Aura enchantment.”
Augment: Adam: Must cost only one mana

Here are the cards done by Rifken on the last episode. I changed some of them for clarity and rules interactions and added names, creatures types, etc for the incomplete ones. If you remember what challenges they are for, let us know!

Friday, June 8, 2018

Something silver-bordered that isn't dice rolling that uses twobrid for a
good reason. (Thanks to Chris Mooney and Ryan Siegel-Stechler)

Worldbuilding:

Just complete all four sections of the Creature Grid survey from last week! (There are four different links, be sure to click them all!)

Two weeks from now (due Monday June 18 at 7pm Pacific):

Host/Augment:

submitted by a bunch of people on twitter: Design a dwarf that has no power or toughness that cares about precombat or postcombat main phase from a top-down Viking world with black-aligned gods/must be multi-colored, in the correct colors for a dwarf. (Editor's note: Seriously, Brad?)

Worldbuilding:

Design a vanilla creature (no rules text), design a virtual vanilla creature (after the first turn, is effectively a vanilla creature), design a french vanilla (creature with only one or more key words, and no other abilites), and design a virtual french vanilla.

Some notes: I had to do four separate surveys because the service wants to charge if I do more than ten questions at a time. Luckily, this time it's an easy fix, but we will have to be careful in the future to not have too many votes each time. Also, the Red and Green ones are together because green has no fliers and red has no small flyers, so it only takes up 8 spaces for both!

Next week's challenges (due Monday, June 4 at 7pm Pacific) :

Host/Augment:

Two colorless creatures that "partner with" each other.

Worldbuilding:

A style guide for the plane. (Thanks to Jonanthan Woodward)

Two weeks from now (due Monday June 11 at 7pm Pacific):

Host/Augment:

Something silver-bordered that isn't dice rolling that uses twobrid for a good reason. (Thanks to Chris Mooney and Ryan Siegel-Stechler)

Worldbuilding:

Just do the survey at the top of the page!

Bonus!

Here are renders of all the cards that were submitted for this week's wordbuilding challenge.

Friday, May 25, 2018

Worldbuilding Challenge:
Cycle of five rare legendary creatures that came into Castmire via the plane’s extraplanar portals, they don’t have to be mechanically or “planarly” linked.

Challenges due on Monday, June 4th:

Host/Augment Challenge:
Two creatures that each have "partenr with" for the other/ they must both be colorless.

Worldbuilding Challenge:
"Style guide" for the plane. Send pictures along with descriptions.

Here's a link to the most recent worldbuilding challenge, the Creature Grid. I've left some spaces open for anyone to add their own creature grids for Castmire. Please don't erase anything that other folks have put in here. I trust you all to be professional.

Our guest, Jonathan Woodward, sent us an email to pass along this Two Headed Giant draft variant for four players:

"Here is my explanation of how to run a full two-headed giant draft with just four players.

A
common problem I have encountered is that drafting with fewer than
eight players can really skew the drafting experience. If there are
only four players present, having only 12 packs to pick cards from means
that the decks assembled often look very little like the decks that
would be built from a 24 pack draft. These drafting issues get even
worse if the format of choice is 2HG, as four players normally only
represents two teams. However, there is a solution to this issue that
works very smoothly for drafting 2HG with just four players.

Our
four players are A, B, C, and D. For the drafting portion of the
event, each of these players represents an entire 2HG team (you can
pretend they have imaginary partners seated beside them who don't offer
any input). Each player begins with six packs (or four packs of
Battlebond) in front of him or her, and drafts a pool of cards from
which to build two 2HG decks, the same as in a regular four team 2HG
draft. After drafting, each of the four players builds two decks from
the cards they drafted - again, the same as a regular 2HG draft.

When
deck construction is complete, it is now time to play player A's decks
against those of the player who drafted on the opposite side of the
table from him, player C. Player B joins player A, and together they
each play one of the A decks in a 2HG game against players C and D
playing C's decks. Let's say that the A decks beat the C decks.

The
next game will be players B and C playing B's decks against players A
and D playing D's decks. Let's say that the B decks win.

In
the third and final round of our single-elimination tournament, players
A and C will play A's decks against players B and D with B's decks.

I've
found this structure to work quite well. One of the fun features of
this method is that everyone gets an opportunity to play on a team with
everyone else."

Monday, May 21, 2018

So, to keep up the trend, I'm doing all the GDS3 challenges in the limited time frame available before the real results are out. The rules for design challenge 2 are here.

Here are my circus cards:

Some notes:

My mythics are a little weird, I know.

Lion Tamer seems a little out of color pie mechanically, but flavorfully, I believe it fits. His control over the cats isn't magical as much as it is nature-oriented. He befriends them instead of dominating their will. (He might actually be a Druid instead of a Shaman, now that I think about it.)

As for Tibalt, I think emblem manipulation is a fun mechanic that hasn't been explored yet. There are some weird rules interactions that might need to be fudged, but I would say the ability is pretty grokkable.